The Meaning of Star Wars is Chewbacca

Roaring and hitting things

When I was 7, I wanted to be Chewbacca. Friends and I would pretend to be different Star Wars characters, and if I didn't get to be Chewie, I would quit. I think I cried on one occasion. (Not very Wookie-like behavior, I'm afraid.)

Why was I so obsessed with the Chewbacca? I don't think it's any particular mystery. Children are small and largely powerless; I in particular was skinny, shy, asthmatic, and occasionally bullied. Chewie on the other hand was gigantic—actor Peter Mayhew, who died in 2019 was 7 foot 3.

Also, Chewie had fur and he growled. Luke was whiney and I found him insufferable even back then. Obi-Wan was old. Darth Vader was appealing, but evil. C3-P0 was annoying; R2 was cutesy. Leia was a girl. Han was interested in girls. Chewie though—he had no distracting character traits, or dialogue, to get in the way. He was just a big, fuzzy, juggernaut of empowerment and appealingly inarticulate growls.

The stories I made up about Chewbacca were not especially complicated. Occasionally we restaged scenes from the film, but for the most part even that was beyond us. Mostly my friends and I would fight stormtroopers. They (as Han and Luke) would shoot the stormtroopers with lasers, and I, as Chewbacca, would pull the stormtroopers' limbs off. Chewbacca never actually pulled any stormtrooper limbs off in the movies, but we all agreed that he should have. Then, often, when we'd run out of stormtroopers, we'd pretend to superglue them back together so we could rip their limbs off again. (No, I don't know why. We thought superglue was cool, I guess. We were seven.)

Simple, bucolic tales of Wookies beating bad guys to death with their own arms sound kind of silly at this point. That's because they're kind of silly. But it's also because the Star Wars franchise is so much more sophisticated now.

Forty years on, Star Wars has generated an infinite number of sequels and prequels and side stories and back stories, a sprawling mythology, and an even more sprawling fandom and critical community. Films like Rogue One and The Last Jedi have been complicated riffs on and responses to earlier films and fan expectations. They generate entire narratives based on a single line of dialogue from an earlier movie. They switch things up so the stormtrooper gets to be the good guy. They teasingly set the Han Solo rebel analogue up for failure when he swaggers off on his unauthorized missions. It's all a lot more complicated than just growling and being tall.

Not all of this complexifying has been bad. The obsessive focus on political machinations in the prequels was a misstep, to put it mildly. But the Star Wars universe as a whole had to be fleshed out somehow over time. You can't go through 10 movies and counting (not to mention cartoons, novelizations, comics, and what not) without providing some explanations about how the Jedi order works, or what the Clone Wars are. You need to fill in some gaps or the whole edifice will collapse.

Inevitably, as those gaps have been filled in, Chewie has become less and less important. There's just not a whole lot you can add to a character who communicates in grunts and growls, and who is essentially just a really big, loyal dog. That's part of why the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special which introduced Chewie's family, was such a train wreck.  A bunch of actors in hairy quasi-monkey suits wandering around a living room growling at each other doesn't make for riveting television. (Nor does the Wookie sexual fantasy about Diahann Carroll…but the less said about that the better.)

Solo: A Star Wars Story did a little better with giving Chewie some comprehensible context, as it showed the Wookie fighting to free his people, enslaved by the Empire. No longer is he simply a giant empowerment fantasy. He is a giant empowerment fantasy with a tragic past. 

Even thus embellished, though, it seems unlikely that there will be a Chewbacca film anytime soon. That's because we've already had one; that first Star Wars film I saw back when I was a kid. Chewie was a minor character even then. But my seven-year-old self was onto something when I picked him as the protagonist.

It's a little hard to remember now, after decades of elaboration, but the initial Star Wars film did not have a lot of depth. It raced along from magnificent set to magnificent set and adventure to adventure, like all those old serials that Lucas loved.

Chewie is the perfect icon for a movie about special effects and awesome feats.  He's a giant cool-looking monster with nothing to say for himself and virtually no character development. If you're creating an epic space opera, filled with weighty destiny and intricate meaningfulness, he's a flop. But he's perfect if you're making a kid's movie.

And the original Star Wars film was mostly for kids. Chewie was like one of those animal mascots in a Disney film, if the mascots were bigger and stronger and could tear the arms off stormtroopers. Peter Mayhew lived long enough to see his character become largely superfluous—a shaggy nostalgia backdrop for Harrison Ford's performance in The Force Awakens.

For me, once, way back when, though, Chewbacca was the whole point; he was what Star Wars was about. Luke becoming a man; that rascal Han finding redemption; Leia winning the war; even Darth Vader and Peter Cushing doing evil stuff—that was all secondary to Chewy being huge and punching people.  My seven-year-old self wouldn't have built a great franchise, even with superglue. Still, he wasn't wrong.

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This originally ran at the Escapist way back when. I find it comforting, so I thought I’d share it with you all.